Air Force Changes Position on Stephenville, TX Sightings-UFO Casebook Files

Air Force Changes Position on Stephenville, TX Sightings

FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News) ― Texas UFO Mystery Solved?

Today the Air Force Reserve said on the night of January 8, ten F-16 fighter jets were conducting training flights in the area. Many of the suspected UFO sightings took place on that night.

Originally, the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base said none of its jets were in the area that night.

In a statement today, a Wing spokesman says they made a mistake and that jets were flying in the Stephenville area that evening. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.

About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which went to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate the alleged sightings.

Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.

UFO sightings have been reported all over the world for centuries, including the infamous 1897 crash of a cigar-shaped object near the tiny Texas town of Aurora. While some thought it was a hoax, decades later investigators from UFO groups said evidence suggests the disfigured pilot's body buried that day was an alien.

In Chicago in late 2006, some United Airlines pilots and other employees reported seeing a saucer-shaped craft hovering over O'Hare Airport before shooting up through the clouds. But federal officials said nothing showed up on the radar and explained it as some type of weather phenomenon.

In 1997, dozens of people saw lights in a V-formation over Phoenix, a mystery that was captured on videotape and spurred calls for a government investigation. A few months later people reported a similar sight over Las Vegas.

One of the most famous cases was the 1947 crash on a ranch near Roswell, N.M. Although the government said it was a top-secret weather balloon, an Army officer who helped recover the debris came forward 30 years later claiming a cover-up, asserting that an alien spacecraft had crashed. Reports later surfaced that a base nurse told someone that autopsies were performed on aliens from the wreckage.